Down to Earth
by lorephunk
Summary: The newly bonded robots and humans of the Axiom, those who never interacted with each other in any meaningful way for 700 years, must now work together to ensure their survival in a new world. There are plenty of tests waiting to make or break them... outside of their walls and within themselves.


'Auto.'

Merciless white outlines the boot diagnostics. Slowly they haul together simulated consciousness, one terabyte at a line. And so comes the memory.

'Auto, respond. Confirm no hostile intent.'

The LidoDeck is compromised. Holo-detector activated. E.V.E and WALL•E units attempting to engage hyperdrive route to Earth. Perform a partial barrel roll to prevent acquisition of plant...

'Auto, confirm no hostile intent or I will power you down.'

Must save humans...

_I don't WANT to survive! I want to live!_

* * *

Benjamin resignedly pressed the manual switch to shut Auto down again. Behind him in the cabin, Eve concealed her cannon with an approving growl and span round in a small arc to take Wallee's rusted shovel in her fin. Auto, disappointingly, hadn't even moved... though he might have been blown apart otherwise.

'No, Ben.' He sighed, running his now substantially thinner fingers through his hairline. 'Hands, hands. They have hands.' Thankfully he mumbled quietly enough that they shouldn't have heard it. He dropped his hand to give the inactive wheel a 'sorry' pat, then turned towards his two guests.

_Of course they heard it, _he thought to himself. _They __have robot hearing._

He paused, scrunching his eyes closed. Damn, it was hard not to think of them as machines.

Wallee was now riding his old hoverchair around the room in a race with Eve, originally having chosen to sit there behind Eve while Auto was reactivated. Ben was surprised the little ro... guy had come up here once he heard what the Captain had planned. If he was in Wallees' place, he would never have stepped into this ship again. But then Wallee was the one who first had the guts to attack Auto for trying to destroy the plant. Purely because it was important to Eve. He was responsible for reuniting a species with its home 700 years after they left him to do all their dirty work, abandoned through cowardice and refusal to take the blame.

They were lucky he ever met Eve. Unlike mankind, she actually deserved his devotion. Somehow, Ben couldn't see Wallee doing what he had done if the first being he had seen in 700 years was a fat boring mess on top of a floating coffin.

Come to think of it, why was he even trying to NOT think of them as machines? They showed more soul than most of the people on this ship together, and they didn't even need a heart to do it. Calling them human would be frankly insulting.

The steel railings on the right side of the central lift folded in beneath the hoverchair, Wallee flew forward into the side of the chute with a clang and a 'eeeerrrrhh' and Eve hung there above him when he landed on his head, hands on him ready to help if she wasn't too busy laughing.

Ben McCrea did pretty much the same thing, holding his ribs with both hands. Wallee's treads span in the air for a moment before he got a grip on the floor and righted himself with his hands. For a second he laughed along with Eve and Ben; then he grabbed Eves' hands and proceeded to spin on the spot, his binocular eyes closed and pressing against Eves' visor.

That had to be admired. Definitely more soul there.

'Wallee, Eve, come over here. I gotta explain myself.' He did feel guilty for trying to awaken the robot who very nearly had the two of them killed, Wallee several times in fact; but Auto had access to the one thing that was affecting the new united effort to heal Earth.

The Captain ambled to the Axioms' personal computer, cast now in sunlight, like the rest of the room. Not the artificial light of the lidodecks' ceiling; on behalf of her superiors' moaning about seeing the stupid B'n'L sun hologram every morning, Eve had rather eagerly blown out all the windows up high.

Cleaning up all the reinforced glass was one thing. Finding out afterwards that the entire deck was now exposed to sandstorms (hastily explained by Wallee) was something else.

Any humans in there now had to take hoverchairs with them incase a quick retreat was needed. Alarms had been synchronised with the Axiom's hull sensor network to warn inside and outside when shelter was necessary. Again, the idea came from Wallee's own warning system.

The idea of having the people use a megastores' worth of broomsticks to sweep away the layers of the sand was Bens'. He had specifically barred any and all robots from dealing with that particular mess, opting publicly instead to 'provide exercise' for those afraid of the ships' jogging track.

His actual reasoning was that these sandstorms were mans' fault. They had to start taking care of their own mess. Robots had toiled alone long enough. But...

'Alright. I know you weren't happy with what I just tried to do. But I have a good reason.' Two treads settled on the floor with a mild clang, having been lifted over the railings, and the odd couple waited for him to continue. 'Computer, bring up B'n'L vacancy fleet details from 2150 onward.' As the list rolled out on the holographic screen in a blur of movement, he put his serious face on. 'We need help. I think I've underestimated the job a little bit. It's fine building our own town outside, making farms and homes and rivers. But there's a whole world to cover out there, and we can't get to it. I think it's time to call the others back home.'

His two guests shared what he guessed was a look of surprise, accompanied by a gentle 'ohhhh' from Wallee. Eve settled for an nod of approval. As Captain, he obviously needed no permission from man nor robot to do his duty. But it made him feel more secure that they liked the plan too.

'We need Auto. The comms between ships can only be opened by him and the other autopilots.' He rubbed his left eye with the knuckles of his fist. 'I need to say... I'm sorry I let him do what he did to you both. I didn't stop him fast enough. On my life, he will not get another chance. He has to come back, but you can do whatever you like to defend yourselves. Agreed?'

Eve looked away from him to Auto's still form, 'hmmed' to herself, then glided forward to catch up with Wallee, who had moved to shake Ben's hand.

'Dirrrective...' he whistled, moving his eyes in a sharp nod.

'Earth.' Eve finished with her hand settled on top of the two males', eyes in happy crescents. 'Call for help. Trust you.'

Ben genuinely grinned from ear to ear. These were true friends.

* * *

Another cloudy day left visibility in the city around the Axiom severely lacking, to say the least. Most of the Axiom's inhabitants were inside today, busy creating things to place in the worn down skyscrapers for infrastructure and comfort. Some were flitting around in building floors high above, calling out or flying around to place piping for the water supply from the filtering plants in the ship. Lighting sparked on and off in random places, generators proving troublesome after 700 years of neglect. A large rectangular box fell 80 feet from the sixth story of an old hotel up ahead, throwing out decaying foodstuffs in a wide arc then shattering on the concrete. Two arguing humans surveyed the damage from the balcony where they dropped it, one bright red in the face.

M.O heard something that sounded like 'WHAT IS YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION?' echoing in the street below before they pulled back into wherever they were.

When he eventually rolled past it, he tried to figure what the box was for. In the end, the fact that there were no visible details he could see on it for the literal swarm of foreign contaminants forced him to give up. With a frustrated shiver and a high pitched warble, the Microbe Obliterator unit turned and raced off in a storm of dust. A kaleidoscope of multi-coloured bits span until he emerged ahead of it, getting his bearings. 2 miles later, taking the turning to the left, then the right, past trash and rust and sand-

In the junction ahead, a shape coloured distinctly in blue, purple and green moved at speed across his vision. Wide-eyed, he tripped over a raised crack in the road and landed on his front, staring at it. Magnifying in, M.O initially took it for a crawling human. But a human wouldn't be that dirty. And they didn't have a tail or triangular ears.

Slowly, he pushed upright on his minature sterilising rotor, watching till it disappeared behind a crumbling wall.

Over on his left came a low snarling noise. That had to be HAN-S, the broken massage robot. Just as he went to trundle to the door which he assumed HAN-S was in, there was another break in the silence.

_Owww__ooooooooooooooooo._

Suddenly, M.O became acutely aware of how alone he was.

* * *

The real HAN-S was cracking old paving slabs under the shadow of the Axiom, working alongside people with sledgehammers to create fragments that would be used for bordering gardens and the one farm they now had. As luck would have it, an exploratory party had discovered a vehicle called 'tractor' that the humans could use to create large farms by themselves, freeing up robot hands. The hunt was on to find more of these, and vehicles like them that could perform other tasks.

HAN-S just hoped nobody found a stone cracking machine. He enjoyed this job, and it kept him distracted enough that he didn't have idle hands anymore. The memory of his Massage Restraining Kinetic Dampener (MRKD) program running into a logic error which compelled him to pursue and batter his last client still filled up his RAM.

It could've been worse, however. Even the now volatile HAN-S flinched when D-FIB told the entire Repair Ward what she was in there for. He never considered how important the Fibrillator Oscillator Rescusitator Encephalogram Heater Electrosurgery Application Directions program was.

Then WALL•E and E.V.E chanced an appearance.

Within forty minutes of first meeting them, he got to terrorise several hundreds of service tunnel commuters, tear roughly 30 SECUR-T's into scrap and almost caught his last client again. He managed to get away by hiding in a pile of other humans, but HAN-S wouldn't forget.

He thought he had spotted WALL•E yesterday, cruising through towers of garbage outside. Not for lack of trying, he failed to catch the low profiled trash robots' attention; all he could vocalise right now was insufficient growls of various pitches, and those rolling treads of WALL•Es' somehow outraced HAN-S' VROOMS propulsion system. It seemed there was yet more to discover about him, besides his unusual ability to override self-preservation protocols and the strange influence he had on fellow robots.

Thinking about it led HAN-S down some very random logic paths... one of them focusing on benefits of being a WALL•E unit.

Considering the benefits of being another model of robot was something that he had never done before.

HAN-S spontaneously wondered why he was always hitting things.

* * *

Up on high, above an anonymous cityscape off to the east, two robots cut a path through the skies.

Eve had always felt as though she could leave her directives on the Earth underneath her when she was flying. It was the closest freedom ever came; to be totally unrestricted by rules, requirements and objectives. For almost two hundred and twenty years of endless searching and hibernation, it was her one chance to just... be.

Her directive now clung to her, sharing every minute of her operating time that it could, even in the skies she once abandoned it for. And she no longer minded. Eve actually embraced and endeavoured to have it as close as possible. What a change it was to her.

Good thing too, because her friend the Captain had once remarked that Wall-e 'looked scared shitless of being dropped'. She would've told him once how Wall-e would never come to harm if she hadn't failed in the same scenario twice already.

'No more.' It was all she could settle for in response, and that had convinced McCrea she meant it. Even now, amidst the constant analysis of flying conditions and turbulence detection, exactly 273 contingency plans were ready to be executed if she lost her hold on Wall-e. They mainly consisted of various aerial manouvres to catch him, but there were a handful that incorporated clever use of her ion cannons' explosive force to reduce his falling speed by 93% a few seconds before impact if catching him was impossible.

Eve supposed the Captains' colloquialism of Wall-e being 'scared shitless' would be inevitable in those cases. She occasionally replayed the moments he came to physical harm trying to help her in her directive. It had to be assumed that the way she had felt then was what that phrase described. How those feelings even manifested within her neural architecture eluded her, existing outside of her original emotional template. It could only be concluded that she; like many others of her kind, a consciousness that was designed to learn by trial and error; had begun to exceed what her creators had planned for.

And yet it all failed to seem anything but... logical.

Sensing Wall-e shifting in her arms, she looked down straight into his binocular eyes. There was that expression again; when the shutters in his lenses would slant diagonally, like he was cutting a snapshot of her from the background of the world around them. Such an action, though like Eves' own separated collection of footage of him, held greater meaning to her than her own recordings did; for Wall-e, in his pre-Axiom design, had limits on video storage. Every nanosecond of her that was permanently saved within him overwrote parts of his old life.

When she thought on it, it left her torn. An upgrade to save him from deleting such history was the solution she wanted. But then it would sting her that she was making Wall-e's decisions for him.

The situation was unacceptable to her. And Eve both loved and hated it. Fitting, given how she was now on the razors' edge of conscious robots.

'Eeevah?' That infallible voice cut her musings short. As usual, in absence of any possible clues; neither her body language, eyes, or flight posture had changed; he knew she was troubled.

_How is he so astute?_

Answering that riddle could take a considerable amount of time, Eve knew. For now, she just loosed another spark on his eyes. She had all the time in the world to figure out what made him so unique.

Flying together would do her just fine today.

l

* * *

l

Hi there if you're reading this. I'm a guy who watched Wall-e for the first time about five weeks ago... six years after it came out.

I'm writing this story in the hopes of expanding upon how robots in this film grow to the level of social intelligence that humans have, and how Wall-e himself in many ways sets the whole thing off. What I really loved about the film is how it speculates on the differences between intelligent humans and intelligent robots at the same level, and the fact that the most humanlike, emotional robots in the whole setup are either broken, lonely or otherwise largely separated from the rest of their kind. I have read a long way into AI development, such as current attempts at creating robots the same way we create babies, by letting them learn about the world by trial and error. It's the way mankind evolved, and it really hits my geeky spot to see that Pixar described the way robots become socially conscious creatures on equal with humans is basically the occasional glitch. I plan to expand on that idea a bit; been reading a new book by michio kaku, and that kinda explores the ways for robots to become intelligent. There will obviously be stuff happening besides me waffling on about how robots are getting more human, cause that would be boring otherwise. As you can tell from the scene with MO, there's trouble around the corner. Also if you see program abbreviations like han-s's VROOMS - (Very Resistant Of Outward Mag-field Superconductor) - i will give their full name somewhere. Like here.

I don't consider this like a Wall-e 2 by the way. Don't think there's need for one really. I just want to explore what would happen afterward. Thanks for reading.


End file.
